God and the Coronavirus (part 1)

This study is my own thinking, conditioned by all have learned. I do not claim any special privilege for what I say or think. There is more than one good way to think on these issues. My way is just one of those ways. My basis of interpretation is the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: There are four sources for understanding the faith: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. Scripture is the most important.

God is potentially all powerful. That is to say that God can be as powerful as God wants to be. God limits God's power, so that we might have some power. Our power is free will. God created the universe and established the workings of the universe under a system that we might call "the laws of nature." The laws of nature are not immutable.  God can intervene in the laws of nature at any moment. For example, it would be within the laws of nature for a people trying to walk through a sea to escape slavery for those people to drown in the sea. But God can intervene with the laws of nature to make a path through which that people can walk without drowning. When their pursuers, the Egyptian military forces, do not fall within the frame of God's intervention. The Israelites path is washed out and the pursuers fall to the law of nature.

So there are three wills in the universe:

1. God's will, which is all ultimately good, and potentially all powerful.
2. Human free will, which God gives us and wants us to use responsibly. Free will can be good or can be bad, even evil, depending on the choices we freely make. There are also many shades of gray in between pure good and pure evil. We are responsible for our choices. God's will is stronger than human will. God can intervene is some of those choices, but God normally chooses not to intervene, but to let us be responsible for the choices we make and the consequences those choices render.
3. There are the laws of nature. I could call them the will of nature.  The will of nature is neither good nor evil.  It is entirely neutral. "The sun shines on the good and the evil. The rain falls on the just and the unjust," as Jesus says in Matthew 5:45. Nature is neutral.
4. I can also add a fourth and somewhat more controversial will:  a will of evil. If you prefer to have evil personified, you can call it the Devil or Satan. There are some things so monstrously evil in our world, that they appear beyond the human capacity for causing evil. Mass murders by insane people or genocides by sane people might go beyond the mere human capacity for evil to something darker--to a force of evil, to a Devil.

So here is the pattern:

1. The will of God--Ultimately all good
2. Human free will--Can be good or can be evil, depending on the choices we make.
3. The laws of nature (we might even say the 'will' of nature--Nature is neither good nor evil, but entirely neutral
4. The will of evil, or will of the Devil--It is all evil

These are the premises from which I will be trying to understand the problem of God and the Coronavirus. In part 2, we will look at what the Bible says related to this subject. The Bible is not consistent on this subject, but I think we can find a pattern there that will bring us understanding.

Faithfully,

Christian